Non-volatile memories have been used as memories in computers and portable information apparatuses. Recently, solid state drives (SSD) using NAND flash memory have gained in popularity for use in computers as an alternative to using simply a hard disk drive (HDD). SSD is considered to have great potential for making inroads in areas of use traditionally considered as limited to HDDs.
Solid State Drive (SSD) has lately been more and more adopted to be used in computer systems either as cache of Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or as a direct replacement of HDD. In such new architectures, the SSD are increasingly used to a) increase access speed to stored (or cached) data, b) reduce power consumption of HDD, c) reduce the size, weight, and power consumption profile of the system, and d) reduce the access latency to the stored (or cached) data.
NAND flash memory based SSD (solid state drive) has been widely adopted in various applications where data access speed is needed. The traditional RAID (redundant array of independent disks) scheme has been adopted in many SSD design. Such traditional RAID schemes, however, can only work if all elements in the RAID group are good.